The Match-Up of Revolution Gaming vs. Merge Gaming

Thursday, June 7th, 2012 by Ryan

Since the online poker site Lock Poker made the move away from the Merge Gaming Network and purchased the Cake Poker Network to create Revolution Gaming, things have been interesting between the two poker networks. While these are two of the primary poker networks that offer online poker play to United States players, they will constantly be battling back and forth for traffic. It’s been just about a week since the Revolution Gaming Network opened up for business, and in the past week there have been some serious changes announced to both poker networks. Both sites are obviously looking to make moves in order to remain as the top option for online poker players in the United States, and it’ll be an interesting battle to watch moving forward.

While the Revolution Gaming Network kicked off last Friday with some excellent promotions and the option for great rakeback, they also featured a new interface for Lock Poker players, and a different color scheme for Cake Poker players. Overall, it got pretty good reviews, and players who made the move to the Revolution Gaming Network (whether they were with them before or not) are pretty happy overall it seems. Both online poker networks made even more announcements during this week though in an attempt to continue to ramp up traffic, and some were more drastic than others.

For starters the Merge Gaming Network decided to fully upgrade their software, and it was a move that was much anticipated by the online poker world. The reviews on the upgrade were not good though, as people put out complaints about the look and feel of the software, and also the bugs that were reported apparently came up pretty often and caused some issues for players. What made this software upgrade even more interesting was the fact that Lock Poker was a key contributor to the software before they left Merge, which meant that the network had to almost completely redo their software, and there’s a chance that they pushed out a final product before it was actually a final product at the end of the day. Lock Poker will be bringing out new software soon as well, and if they end up getting better reviews in terms of the software then they could get a nice bump in traffic overall.

The Revolution Gaming Network also made a nice change that came in as pretty exciting news for their players, as they announced that they will be paying out rakeback to players once per hour instead of once per day. The option of getting rakeback sent to your account once per day is nice, but getting it hourly is even better. Rakeback will instantly show up in a players account, and is great because it can help you avoid taking any major losses or down swings as the money will keep your account building up over the hours as you play.

As far as the traffic between the two, they are actually almost even in terms of overall numbers. While there is still potential for one side to swing up or down with all of these changes that are coming out, I’m interested to see what happens with the numbers over the next few weeks. Nothing will fully be known until Revolution comes out with their changes, but expect movement one way or the other!